508, GH7, NALSAR University of Law.
That was my room.
On my door is a Che Guevara quote: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.” That’s me – leftist, queer, neurodivergent, middle-class, Muslim. Not just a law student, but a living contradiction in a place built to muffle people like me.
When you walked into that room, the left wall would speak first. There were three posters. One had Dr. Ambedkar, Periyar, and Marx – framed together, a collage of resistance. Next to it was the Preamble to the Indian Constitution. And besides that, a handmade pride flag – cut and glued from paper – bearing a hand-drawn vulva in the centre and the word LOVE above it. My roommate M and I made it together in the first weeks of moving in. Two queer people, claiming space with paper, crayons, and tape in an institution that only offered silence.
But it was the opposite wall – damaged, uneven one – that held me.
The wall was already scarred – cracks and scratches left behind by construction. I didn’t try to fix it. I taped over the wounds – clear tape scrawled with black and red permanent marker. My first words were: SHE HEALED HERSELF. I wanted that to be true. Then came others, in loops of ink and panic.
The personal is political. The political is personal.
That was my centre.
Every silence I broke, every assertion I made, every identity I embodied was political. And every news report, court judgment, or classroom debate on ‘rights’ felt deeply personal. There is no abstraction when your body is the battleground.
Another strip read: In loving memory of her.
I was suicidal when I wrote that. I still am, most days. But that week, I wanted to leave a message for whoever found my body. Later, when I hadn’t died, I added a word: Phases. In loving memory of her phases. I wasn’t sure I’d survive the next one either, but I wanted to mark the ones that had already tried to kill me.
Suicide is a confession.
That one made my psychiatrist ask if I thought I was Dickens. I laughed. I didn’t tell him I meant every word.
The wall became a living, breathing body – fragile and furious. Every inch held a piece of me that I couldn’t say out loud.
There were dozens of declarations. Some defiant:
Inquilab Zindabad.
Some soft, almost whispered:
Sad birds still sing.
Do you have a smile I can borrow?
The sound of rain.
Some were fragments of pain and hope written at 3 am in a panic spiral:
Scars bleed strength.
I hope you live.
You are my favourite poem.
Every mortal will taste death.
Silence is loud.
There were verses from songs I loved, quotes I couldn’t source, words that only made sense in that room. Some were in Malayalam. Some written backwards. Some crossed out and rewritten. The wall wasn’t always beautiful – but it was always real.
Together, the writings made a wall that refused erasure. Not aesthetic, but insurgent. Not decoration, but documentation. A manifesto of madness, queerness, resistance, and everything else the law school had no vocabulary for.
Because spaces like NALSAR are designed to be apolitical, neutral, elite. They speak in footnotes and case laws, not hunger or caste or depression. There’s no place in the syllabus for a queer, Muslim, mentally ill student to just be – without explaining, justifying, or shrinking. And if you come from a non-urban, non-elite, non-cisgender world, you learn early to flatten yourself into silence.
But my wall refused to be silent. It screamed, wept, remembered.
Until that day when I tore it all down.
Everything – the posters, the tape, the words, the love – I ripped off the wall in a rage that I don’t fully remember. I razed. And then I collapsed – I tried to kill myself. The wall stood empty. I didn’t.
For months after, I was gone. Hospital beds, locked wards, long silences. When I finally came back to Room 508, the door opened to a ghost.
The wall was blank. Except for the scars.
Scratches where tape had once been. Ink stains in the shape of old words. Ghosts of things that had once held me. It felt like I was staring at a crime scene. But the victim was still breathing.
I sat down. I didn’t cry.
And then, I began again.
The first words I wrote were the same ones that had once given me language:
The personal is political. The political is personal.
Maybe I’m not rebuilding. Maybe I’m archiving the collapse.
But I know the wall is speaking again. And this time, it’s not alone.
Because the politics of space is not theoretical when you come from the margins. My room is not décor. It’s protest. It’s mourning. It’s testimony. Every line of tape was an act of reclaiming, a refusal to be erased.
508 is not a metaphor. It is a site of survival. Of unspeakable things. Of dreams denied and still demanded.
And that wall? It held me when nothing else did.
Main quote background image credit: P R on Unsplash. Image is representative.
